GRANTA, which describes itself as “the magazine of new writing”, takes on a new topic in each issue, and comes at it from different angles, with a dozen or so essays, stories and poems. It does not try to define its subject, or have the last word on it, but—at its best—illuminates it in many different ways.

This is a particularly satisfactory approach to a subject as huge and multifaceted as 9/11. Granta's issue on the tenth anniversary of the attack on America offers an account by Ahmed Errachidi, a former Guantánamo Bay inmate, of his relationship with the ants in his cell; Pico Iyer on how airport security guards no longer discriminate between people of different races and nationalities so that airports have become “places where everyone may be taken to be guilty until proven innocent”; Nadeem Aslam's tale of a random Pathan being sold by fellow tribesmen to the Americans as a terrorist; and Declan Walsh's fine account of the disastrous impact of the Afghan war on Pakistan's tribal areas.

The two most memorable pieces are the bookends of the issue. The first, by Phil Klay, an Iraq veteran, tells of the impact of the war on America through the story of a soldier who has come home, after the flag-waving and the cheers. It tells of the disturbing images that flash through his mind; of the drunk comrade whose life had fallen apart, though he did not know it, while he was away; of how difficult it is to be normal.

Mr Klay explains this through the colour-coded alerts. White is secure, orange is alert, red is danger. Ordinary Americans, who haven't been to Iraq, are on white; some veterans stay on red, then crash, and maybe die; all the rest stay on orange. “Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of the environment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twenty yards away.” That is as it should be in Fallujah, but it makes life difficult in Wilmington, Delaware, when you are trying to become once more the person your wife fell in love with.

The article that really sticks in the mind is by Anthony Shadid, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, on Baghdad College, a school that used to be run by American Jesuits. It tells of the slow decline of an institution which once educated Iraqi boys and girls to accept a nonsectarian, cosmopolitan notion of what Iraq was and who they might become. This fine piece of reportage is at once calm and shocking: it portrays a relationship between America and the Arab world that was based on culture and mutual attraction, not on conquest and violence. It is hard to imagine, now, that things ever were like that, let alone that they might ever be again.